As part of our ongoing efforts to support the open source and academic communities, Google provides funding to researchers investigating open source software development. Over the last 3.5 years, Martin Michlmayr, a former leader of the Debian project, has investigated aspects of release management in volunteer open source projects. Martin is studying for a PhD degree and his work is in part supported by Google. His particular interest is in quality improvement and he's therefore investigating problems that occur with release management and ways to solve them.

As he's nearing the completion of this PhD, Martin has started writing about the findings from his research. He has published a series of seven postings in his blog in which he presents the open source projects he studied. For each project, he briefly summarizes what problems the project faced in the past, what changes they have implemented to address these problems, and what outstanding problems they still have.